I started looking for summer internships in January. It was the first summer I declined the minimum-wage retail job I’d had for the past four years. (Sorry, minimum wage plus $0.25: my boss made a big deal about giving me that tiny raise).
I had built work experience from a few long-term service positions, but their stipends added up to less than minimum wage. This year, I was looking forward to having a job that actually used what I’d learned in college — and made more than the state-mandated $15 an hour.
Getting a real, button-up-shirt kind of job was more than just the chance to do real non-profit work. It would also let me dodge uncomfortable questions about my summer plans. All around me, students talked about working on Capitol Hill or interning with a hospital or law firm.
Everyone was really understanding whenever I said I was still job-hunting. They told me that I had plenty of time to nail down summer plans, and even recommended places to find job postings. But it only made my anxiety worse. As summer got closer and closer, I watched as my friends accepted job offers, one by one.
I knew I’d be competing with these people for post-college jobs. If everyone but me had a junior year internship, what chance would I have of getting hired?
These feelings of worry, stress, and inadequacy drove a frenetic wave of job applications. I submitted over fifty applications over Handshake, which my school’s career counselors promised were less competitive than LinkedIn. I checked school-run job boards specifically for social science students.
But my stomach tightened with dread, over and over, as I looked at unpaid internship postings with over 8,000 applicants. How were there so many of us fighting over the same job? Were there even that many college students in the city? I have relevant experience in this, I kept telling myself as I submitted application after application. But I knew that every other applicant was telling themselves the same thing.
Where were the jobs my peers were getting? Research positions weren’t on the table: my classes were either humanities courses or too theoretical for professors to need help with empirical research. And going back to previous service opportunities would mean taking work below minimum wage, something I promised myself I would avoid this summer.
Professors and previous employers: were these everyone’s alternatives to Handshake? That had to be the case — how else were there enough internships that everybody except me seemed to have one? Or were there job boards I never knew about? Resume or cover letter formalities I’d forgotten, unforgivable interview gaffs? Most of my applications got ghosted, of course, but I did get two interviews that seemed to go well enough. It felt like the letters ‘DNH’ — “do not hire” — were stamped on my face in a shade of ultraviolet only employers could see.
Slowly, I was able to look past that kind of overthinking. A lot of my friends’ jobs I thought were so great turned out to be below minimum wage, or more grunt work than academic substance. One friend’s job with a machine learning research lab (which I’d been particularly jealous of) turned out to just be circling pictures of tumors to train an AI model. Meanwhile, my brother won himself a good-quality sales job and racked up several interviews, all without going to college.
I was able to put together some decent summer plans, too. The week after I got home from school, I fired off last-minute emails to every professor I’d ever had and asked about a research opportunity. Three professors responded, and one had an offer: comparative literature research into Renaissance poetry for a small stipend.
I also got a non-paying advocacy internship in Norwalk (much smaller than Philadelphia, where I’d done most of my applications). Most importantly, I got hired by the non-profit where my mom worked, and where I’d previously done AmeriCorps service, to do part-time substance prevention work.
This experience partially taught me that getting a good job outside of college is possible. Good jobs exist without degrees, and internships are absolutely not all they’re cracked up to be. But work history does still matter. My experience showed me just how messed up the current job market is. Ghost job postings, AI-generated postings and applications, and hybrid/remote work has made navigating the swamps of LinkedIn and Handshake pretty much impossible. Young people’s best options for getting a job are leveraging our connections, whether professors and past employers.
And I think that’s pretty revolting. I got my jobs this summer because I had the privilege of going to a good college and working for my mom’s non-profit department. Our capitalist hellscape makes job opportunities contingent on a.) the privilege of having good connections and b.) the ability to exploit them. A good, dignified, well-paying job should be a universal right, not something available to a precious few.
Fighting for an equitable workplace for all Gen-Zers is a necessary part of feeling better about the job market. It’s something we can use CT Support Group’s great peer-support resources to discuss. We as Gen-Zers can come together to support each other through a genuinely terrible job market and help each other find good jobs. Changing our circumstances like this is exactly what peer support means to me. ~ Ben
